You don't know history very well. AMD chips will always be an option for OS X and Apple, especially if Intel can't match growth and intentionally sandbags any future projects.
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AMD Announces ATI Radeon HD 3870 Card For Mac and PC
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You don't know history very well. AMD chips will always be an option for OS X and Apple, especially if Intel can't match growth and intentionally sandbags any future projects.
AMD might see it as a nice avenue for revenue. Their CPU business is probably struggling a bit seeing as they still can't touch Intel's Core2 architecture. Of course, this is nothing more than a small side job, but they could always expand their offering.
It makes perfect business sense for AMD to do this because:
1 - Some people prefer ATI to nVidia and the only ATI card Apple sells is the base card which only has 256MB.
2 - Resell value. A person can buy this card for their Mac Pro/PC, as well as, sell it to a person with a Mac Pro/PC when they get the "latest and greatest" card.
but 1000^5(1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes does equal a petabtye according to all hard drive manufactures
But back on topic, I hope someone can download a flash from a Mac 3870 so we can buy a PC 3870 on the cheap and just flash it like people were doing with the 8800GT
Of corse it will only work with a MacPro, Apple is so tight-@ssed when it comes to upgradeability that only their top-end $2,700+ systems can get a video-card upgrade.
Throw it in the XServe.
The point is that this card doesn't have the lowprofile design to fit into the iMac, not to mention the non-existent option for the Mac mini.
So? they use ATI video cards in their macs, why shouldn't ATI make after-market cards?
And btw, has anyone noticed that Snow-Leopard requires an Apple supplied video card, effectively eliminating the market for after-market video cards once 10.6 hits?
So this ATI 3870 will be a brick when snow leopard is released? Isnt this the first and ONLY after market video card for mac pros? Is it really that difficult to for apple to add support for ONE extra video card? If it is.......all hail big brother, because we all know how steve jobs says 'apple believes in choice'
Meaning no 3rd party driver support ATM.
But once 10.6 is Retail, ATi (and maybe even nVidia...) will have their drivers ready.
Has happened before. Been having fun with early Mac OS X builds (Rhapsody, DP2, DP3, Public Beta) and all have problems with non-standard Apple-supplied grfx cards.
Is there more info on this? Is it available to buy yet? I can't locate it anywhere.
*Edit - Whoops, nevermind, macsales has it.
*Edit - Whoops, nevermind, macsales has it.